MSNBC’s Al Sharpton enjoys a position of power and privilege in elite society, which is really something to behold considering he helped incite anti-Semitic riots in New York City in the 1990s.
“Decades later, Sharpton still insists: No justice, no peace,” reads the headline to an especially soft-glow profile published this week by the Associated Press.
It adds, “Sharpton — once dismissed by some as a fraud, a jester — is still standing. He reaches multitudes on television and on radio. The man who helped popularize the 1980s cry, ‘No justice, no peace,’ is putting himself at the center of a new wave of activism, in a new millennium.”
Absent from the Associated Press’s love letter to the cable news host is any mention of the fact that “No justice, no peace” was the same slogan that Sharpton chanted in 1991 as he incited anti-Semitic riots in New York City, where violent agitators also chanted, “Kill the Jews!”
You are not going to read about that in the Associated Press’s profile.
In July 1991, then-City College of New York professor Leonard Jeffries delivered an address wherein he accused “rich Jews” of financing the slave trade and controlling Hollywood so they could “put together a system of destruction for black people.”
Sharpton, naturally, defended Jeffries’s remarks, telling critics at the time, “If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house.”
Exactly one day after he challenged Jews to come and fight him, a Jewish motorist accidentally struck and killed a 7-year-old black child in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, sparking an anti-Semitic riot in which Jewish rabbinical scholar Yankel Rosenbaum was stabbed to death, as noted by my Washington Examiner colleague Phil Klein.
Sharpton himself led marches in the streets, where demonstrators chanted, “No justice, no peace” and “Kill the Jews!”
Later, at the funeral for the child killed in the motorist accident, Sharpton said, “The world will tell us he was killed by accident. Yes, it was a social accident. … It’s an accident to allow an apartheid ambulance service in the middle of Crown Heights. … Talk about how Oppenheimer in South Africa sends diamonds straight to Tel Aviv and deals with the diamond merchants right here in Crown Heights.”
One need not be particularly well-versed in anti-Semitic tropes to know what he meant by “diamond merchants.”
When an investigation of the motorist incident concluded and the driver was not indicted, Sharpton personally flew to Israel to “hunt down” the driver responsible for the child’s death so he could hand him a civil lawsuit. In Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport, a woman reportedly shouted at Sharpton, “Go to hell!”
“I am in hell already. I am in Israel,” he responded, according to the Daily News.
If you can believe it, there is more where that comes from, none of which the Associated Press mentions in its heroic profile of Sharpton (via Klein):
Protesters led by Sharpton’s National Action Network picketed outside the store day after day, referring to Jews as “bloodsuckers” and threatening, “We’re going to burn and loot the Jews.” The demonstrators also struck matches and threw them into the store’s doorway. Two months into the protest, one of the demonstrators stormed into the store armed with a gun, and burned the place to the ground, killing seven people, and shooting himself.
Instead of including the pertinent fact that Sharpton’s life story includes a decadeslong dance with anti-Semitism, Associated Press readers are treated instead to lines such as, “[He] constantly courted controversy for using inflammatory language against his opponents. He reserved his most fiery rhetoric for elected officials and attorneys representing police officers and alleged assailants in case after case of racial violence.”
The profile does, however, make a passing reference to Tawana Brawley, whose completely bogus sexual assault allegation was championed by Sharpton. But the article mentions the incident in which Sharpton whipped up a mob against innocent men only so it can soften his role in the shameful ordeal, claiming he “was hardly the only prominent New York figure who believed Brawley’s story.”
“But even today, some of Sharpton’s critics will bring up the case to discredit him,” the article notes. You think?
The story adds that the cable host himself says of the supposed regret he has for that period in his life that he “would have looked into situations more deeply before getting involved.”
“Sometimes your vanity outruns your sanity and you do things for posture. But it’s all part of growing up,” Sharpton told the Associated Press.
His version of “growing up” ruined former Dutchess County Assistant District Attorney Steven Pagones’s career and marriage. Pagones won a defamation suit against Sharpton later in 1998, which Sharpton refused to pay. Sharpton’s followers ended up footing the bill on his behalf. Pagones, who Sharpton singled out by name during the Brawley incident, alleging, without evidence, a police cover-up, has never received an apology.
The profile mentions none of this, by the way. None of the stuff about Sharpton’s anti-Semitism and none of the stuff about Sharpton ruining Pagones’s life. Instead, readers are treated to this schlock: “For more than three decades, Sharpton, 65, has been a go-to advocate for Black American families seeking justice and peace in the wake of violence and countless incidents that highlight systemic racism. He has a penchant for seizing the national spotlight and focusing the public on police brutality and acts of hatred against Black people, particularly at moments of heightened tensions and grief.”
The Associated Press’s rehab effort added, “But Sharpton now contends with a new question: In what shape will he leave the world for Marcus Al Sharpton Bright, the only male heir to the family legacy?”
“I’m going to do this until I die,” Sharpton told the Associated Press. “Put your ear down to the casket, and I’ll be saying ‘No justice, no peace’ as they lower me all the way down.”
He should make sure to say it extra loud so those killed in his riots can hear him.
